Understanding where your customers come from is essential for growing your online store. WooCommerce’s order attribution feature helps you track which marketing channels actually bring in sales, so you can spend your budget on what works.
What is order attribution?
Order attribution shows you exactly how customers found your store before making a purchase. Instead of guessing which marketing efforts work, you get clear data about whether customers came from paid ads, social media, email campaigns, or search engines.
This feature uses a “last click” model, which means it tracks the final channel a customer used before buying from you. This helps you understand which touchpoints actually convert visitors into buyers.
How to find your order attribution data
Finding this information in your WooCommerce store is straightforward:
- Go to your WooCommerce dashboard
- Navigate to “Orders” in your admin menu
- Click on any individual order
- Look for the order attribution report in the sidebar
The report shows you:
- What channel the customer used to reach your store
- How many pages they viewed during their visit
- Whether they shopped on desktop, mobile, or tablet
- Detailed breakdown of the tracking data
Understanding UTM parameters
UTM parameters are the key to getting detailed insights from order attribution. These are short pieces of code added to your website links that track where visitors come from.
The five types of UTM parameters
Source: Where the traffic comes from (like “google” or “facebook”)
Medium: The type of traffic (like “paid-ads”, “email”, or “organic”)
Campaign: The specific campaign name (like “summer-sale-2024”)
Term: Keywords used in paid search campaigns
Content: Specific ad creative or link within an email
Source Platform: The specific platform (helpful for distinguishing between different social networks)
Setting up UTMs for social media ads
When running ads on social platforms, structure your UTMs like this:
- UTM Source: The ad network name (like “facebook-ads”)
- UTM Medium: “paid-social”
- UTM Campaign: Your campaign name (like “holiday-promotion”)
- UTM Content: The specific ad creative name
- UTM Source Platform: The social platform name (like “facebook”)
Setting up UTMs for Google Ads
For paid search campaigns:
- UTM Source: “google-ads”
- UTM Medium: “paid-search”
- UTM Campaign: Your campaign name
- UTM Term: The keyword that triggered your ad
- UTM Source Platform: “google”
How to use this data to grow your store
Once you start collecting order attribution data, you can:
- See which marketing efforts actually lead to sales, not just website visits.
- Move money from channels that don’t convert to ones that do.
- Test different approaches and see which campaigns bring in the most revenue.
- Know exactly how much revenue each marketing dollar generates.
Privacy and data collection
WooCommerce order attribution respects customer privacy by:
- Only storing data temporarily in browser cookies
- Saving attribution data only when someone actually makes a purchase
- Automatically deleting cookies after each browsing session
- Not tracking visitors across multiple visits
- Not building detailed behavioral profiles
The system only collects the essential information needed to understand how customers found your store for their purchasing session.
Getting started
To make the most of order attribution:
- Start adding UTM parameters to all your marketing links
- Use consistent naming conventions across campaigns
- Check order attribution data weekly to spot trends
- Test different marketing channels and compare their attribution data
- Adjust your marketing spend based on what the data shows
Remember that this feature shows you the last touchpoint before purchase, so customers might have interacted with your brand multiple times before buying. Use this data alongside other analytics to get a complete picture of your customer journey.
The order attribution feature is included with WooCommerce and starts collecting data automatically once you update to a compatible version.
